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NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite snapped a photo of the far side of the moon, which is never visible to us on Earth, as it crossed in front of our planet last month — and the result is beautiful. The agency used the satellite’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), which monitors the fully illuminated side of the earth for ozone, vegetation, cloud height, and the composition of the atmosphere, and which will begin regular observations in September.

The image shown above was snapped during the afternoon EDT on July 16th, and is actually available in an animated composite series that you can view below in the embedded video, which was recorded over a period of five hours. DSCOVR is orbiting the Earth at Lagrange point 1 (L1), which is approximately 1 million miles away. EPIC is an 11.8-inch telescope and 2K-by-2K CCD (charge-coupled device) that measures both UV and visible spectrum with a resolution of 16 to 22 miles, in 10 narrow wavelength ranges. A natural color image of Earth and the moon like this is created by combining three separate red, green, and blue exposures in quick succession.

“It is surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon,” said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. “Our planet is a truly brilliant object in dark space compared to the lunar surface.”

We never saw the first Blue Marble photo of Earth until 1972 — and are now beginning to get brand new ones in the first time in forever — but a similar thing applies to the moon. While astronomers and the curious have looked up at the moon for millennia, we only got our first look at the far side of the moon in 1959 via the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft sent back images.

The DSCOVR mission spans NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Air Force, and aims to bring real-time solar wind monitoring for accurate space weather alerts and forecasts — including for events such as geomagnetic storms that could affect our nation’s power grid, telecommunications, and GPS accuracy.

Beginning next month, NASA will post new images from DSCOVR’s EPIC every day on a dedicated public website that’s yet to be revealed, within 12 to 36 hours of when they are each taken. NASA hopes EPIC will deliver a total of 10,000 images over the next 18 months, which should shed plenty of light on our planet’s climate — and bring us some truly beautiful photos from outer space in the process.

Click below for a full-resolution version of the photo at the top of this story. Meanwhile, I’ll be off listening (yet again) to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” to celebrate.